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Night or day-it did not matter three hundred feet beneath the desert.

All was in darkness. A man dressed in Israeli battle fatigues crawled slowly through an air duct a few feet at a time. He moved cautiously lest he make a noise or stumble upon one of the many down shafts that plunged a hundred feet deeper into the bedrock. He was sweating profusely even though the air streaming past the back of his head was cool, almost cold. To be caught here, of all places, would mean a certain and probably unpleasant death. The man who’d been known as Benjamin Rothstein to his superiors for the past eighteen months wiped his brow with the back of his hand and continued. Fifty feet farther he began to finally see the first diffuse glimmerings of light, dull and red; flashing, he realized as he crawled closer to its source. He stopped when he could make out the square shape of the source, and he held his breath to listen. The only sounds, however, were the gentle rushing of the airconditioning and the low-pitched rumble of some machinery. After a few moments he continued, coming at length to a louvered opening in the air duct. It was three in the morning. No one would be here. Nevertheless he hesitated at the louvers for a full ten minutes, listening for anything, a stray scrap of conversation, a footfall, a clink of metal against metal, the vault door opening or closing. But there was nothing. Rothstein, whose real name was Vladimir Ivanovich Tsarev, Vladi to his friends at the Frunze Naval Academy, took a small penlight from his pocket and flashed it once on the legend marked above the louvered opening: I-A-7. He managed a tight smile. He was actually here at the main vault. Ten incoming air vents kept the cavern cool, the air fresh. It was called negative laminar airflow.

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